Works

The Iliad

Citation Formats

General Reference

Literature Atlas. "The Iliad." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://literature.interactiveatlas.org/works/the-iliad.

APA Style

Literature Atlas. (n.d.). The Iliad. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://literature.interactiveatlas.org/works/the-iliad

BibTeX

@misc{literatureatlas-the-iliad,
  author = {Literature Atlas},
  title = {The Iliad},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://literature.interactiveatlas.org/works/the-iliad},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

An epic poem of some 15,000 lines recounting several weeks near the end of the ten-year Trojan War, centered on the wrath of the Greek warrior Achilles after a quarrel with his commander Agamemnon over a captured woman. Rather than narrating the whole war or Troy's fall, the poem concentrates on Achilles' withdrawal from battle, its catastrophic cost, and his eventual return to avenge his companion Patroclus, killed by the Trojan prince Hector. Its influence on later Western epic, tragedy and the broader literary tradition's treatment of heroism, mortality and rage is difficult to overstate.

Facts

Disputed

Composed, From (Year)

from 750 BCE 1

Given as circa 750 to 700 BCE by most modern classical scholarship, reconstructed from linguistic layering within the text and comparison with the archaeological record rather than any external date; the poem's roots in oral tradition reach considerably further back than its written composition, and some scholars argue for a later, seventh-century fixation in writing. See the Homeric Question for the deeper authorship dispute this dating is bound up with.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Authored By

Homer

Why this is disputed. Attribution to a single poet named Homer is itself the Homeric Question; the poem is cited here under the traditional attribution, which remains the scholarly convention even though it is not treated as settled fact.

Source The Norton Anthology of World Literature